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NEW ORLEANS — President Obama should use the anniversary of
Hurricane Katrina to inject new energy into the unfinished task of repairing
New Orleans, according to officials from the region, but will also face pressure from Gulf state lawmakers to drop the drilling moratorium and speed up recovery from the BP oil spill.

Obama will deliver a speech here Sunday to mark five years
to the day that Katrina made landfall, devastating the city and tarnishing the
presidency of George W. Bush.

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Showcasing the progress in New Orleans under his
administration could also help boost the president's sagging approval ratings
and with it, the fortunes of his party in November. His speech, officials say,
should offer a way to find balance between further oil exploration and
protecting the region’s sensitive coastline.

But Louisiana's congressional delegation —
Democrats and Republicans — has a key focus of getting the president to lift the moratorium on
offshore oil drilling his administration imposed in the wake of the BP spill.

“We’re also going to mention to him that this moratorium
that is in place — this blanket moratorium is causing severe economic damage to
small businesses as well as to the oil and gas companies, large and small,
independent, as well,” she said. “So this is a lot of what he’s going to hear
when he’s here.”

Obama is now saddled with helping the region recover from
both disasters — a responsibility fraught with political risk.

As a presidential candidate, Obama gained traction by
criticizing his predecessor for his response to the disaster and for failing to
instill a sense of urgency in the recovery effort in the wake of the storm.

“There is not a sense of urgency in this administration to
get this done,” Obama said of the recovery effort in January 2007. “You get a
sense that will has been lacking in the last several months.”

But two years into his administration, New Orleans is still
being rebuilt. The city’s population is now about 100,000 less than it was
before the storm, according to some estimates. And hard-hit areas like the
Lower Ninth Ward are still dotted with hundreds of vacant, decaying
buildings.

Obama is now grappling with a new disaster in the Gulf, this
one entirely man-made. The BP oil spill, which resulted in one of the worst
environmental disasters in U.S. history, appeared to drain Obama, who was
reduced to urging officials to “plug the damn hole.”

Conservatives, such as radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, have
lambasted the president's handling of the spill, labeling it “Obama's Katrina.”

But some of Obama’s critics in Louisiana say that comparison
of the two disasters is unfair.

Some might weigh the political fallout from the disasters with
the same scale, but their impacts on the region and the city of New Orleans are
vastly different.

“I don’t think the president handled the BP disaster in a
competent way, I don’t think it showed the sense of urgency that we needed very
early on. But I don’t think it’s fair to make any comparisons,” Scalise said.

Hurricane Katrina, for instance, directly claimed more than
1,300 lives and prompted a mass exodus of residents, thousands of whom have yet
to return. It destroyed or damaged an estimated 275,000 homes. A study by the
Department of Commerce calculated economic damages at more than $100
billion.

Meanwhile, the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon that
triggered the spill killed 11 workers, and the underwater well in the Gulf of
Mexico released some 184 million gallons of oil over three months. The environmental
damage is still being catalogued, but tourists have already made their judgment.
The U.S. Travel Association estimated the spill could cost the four Gulf states
nearly $23 billion dollars in lost tourism revenue during the next three years.

“There’s a long way go,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
said about the region's recovery effort.

The lingering effects of the BP spill — and the
investigation into what caused the disaster — has overshadowed the fifth-year
anniversary of Katrina. But Landrieu said he isn't worried that the clean-up
operation will take away from the effort to rebuild the city — it might actually
help.

“Katrina and the BP oil spill are two sides to the same
coin,” he said. “They’re both man-made disasters, they’re both threatening the
ecosystem, they’re both threatening the cultures. It’s got to be another
wake-up call for the country to respond in a holistic way to the catastrophic
events that occur.

“It gives the country another opportunity to do it better
this time,” he added.